Why Manly Skincare Is Better

Skincare. Not so very long ago, a man would have been mocked mercilessly for using just the word, never mind the products themselves. But now we’re all mature, we’re all free, non-judgemental, confident in ourselves and our sexuality. Yes, whatever yins your yang, it’s all totally groovy.

So we’re all using skincare products, nobody’s mocked for moisturizing and we’re all looking much better for it. However, the women’s market is obviously much more developed than the men’s one, with new products and processes coming out as fast as marketing people can think them up – promising to hydrate the dried, regenerate the degenerate, lift and luminate (and possibly even laminate) the inanimate. If you can be led to believe it, they’ve got a product for it. And not only are there eleventy times more products for women, they also seem to be more expensive. A lot more expensive. Why is that?

Are products refined for women more refined – since they have finer and softer skin, are their products subtler, more difficult to make and so more expensive? Probably not. I would think it’s probably all the same stuff, or at least variations of the same stuff, just put into different bottles. At any rate, I can’t see why products for women should be so much more expensive to make – the “science” is all the same, and it’s all skin.

On a side point, I think that anyone, of either sex, who pays for skin products in whole units of a stable currency per teaspoonful, is mental. It’s called cosmetics because that’s all it is – cosmetic: just fillers, paint and glue. Nothing in any of it actually “rejuvenates” skin or “reduces” wrinkles. It just glues it taut and fills the cracks. And as for “nourishing” your skin, you might as well put steak and eggs on your face, because it’s about as likely that your skin will absorb nutrition that way as by putting a “nourishing” skin cream there. So if you’re paying through both nostrils of your nose just to keep it from shining or flaking, take a step back. You could, without doubt, do the same for a lot less.

Are women just more gullible then? Can you sell anything to a woman, even things that men would dismiss immediately as snake-oil hogwash hoo-hah. Well I can’t really see why that would be the case. If women were so much more gullible, for example, every schoolboy would be sexually satisfied – and we all know how far from reality that is.

No, I think it’s something else. I think it’s just that the old chestnut that women just have far more pressure on them to look good, to resist ageing, to bolster their appearance and get every ounce of aesthetic out of it than they can, throughout their lives, is true. And because they’re under this pressure, they will go to greater lengths than men to get it – including paying more. And this, combined with the amount of effort put in by skincare companies to developing new products, just ramps it all up. Add in the fact that men are beginning to take an interest in skincare, and you’ve got even more of that pressure.

So I think that women are probably relatively overcharged for their skincare. Of course, there is something they could do about it. They could just start buying men’s products instead. After all, it’s just the same stuff in a slightly manlier tube.

Contact the author here: thewhy@morningquickie.com